


domestic bliss

by lackingsoy



Series: hand over hand [2]
Category: All For The Game - Nora Sakavic
Genre: (beware the non-certified medical inaccuracy), Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, F/F, Fix-It, Fluff and Angst, Found Family, Gen, Hurt/Comfort, M/M, Not Canon Compliant, aaron sees kevin as family can't change my mind, allison is catty in all the right ways, humane abuse aftermath, kevin day disregarding abby's certified medical advice every .2 seconds, kevin day gets validated, no sir, renison are kevin's new protectors i dont make the rules, the Adults of the Series Actually Give a Proper Shit and Do Their Jobs
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-08-25
Updated: 2020-08-25
Packaged: 2021-03-07 03:13:28
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,287
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26099971
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lackingsoy/pseuds/lackingsoy
Summary: Kevin felt the eyes of all his teammates on him, looking, seeing, condoning or pitying or denying. He kept his eyes on Andrew and his locked jaw, his brow, the tenseness in his fingers, spread up his arms and coiled in the rest of him like a nocked bow."What." Kevin finally said, breaking the silence between them for the first time since Andrew made him talk. His voice was a mangled mess of a thing, launched out of him as if to rip and ruin.Andrew stared back at him, mouth clenched shut, and didn't speak. Wouldn't. His eyes were iron.Abuse aftermath is seen to seriously by Wymack and Abby; consequences are left in the hands of the Foxes; and a few finally make unprecedented moves. Kevin just wants to die, so maybe nothing's different. (Except it is; has to be.)
Relationships: Allison Reynolds/Renee Walker (All For The Game), Kevin Day & Allison Reynolds, Kevin Day & Andrew Minyard, Kevin Day & David Wymack, Kevin Day & Renee Walker, Kevin Day & The Foxes (All For The Game), Neil Josten/Andrew Minyard
Series: hand over hand [2]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1887538
Comments: 12
Kudos: 80





	domestic bliss

**Author's Note:**

> alrighty folks, we get into the gritty of the Shit. going off the rails from here, this is the divergence we deserved and never got. 
> 
> fat fucking thanks to @essence-29 on tumblr (again!) for bolstering this fic! love u!!
> 
> [title's inspo song](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SYFIkEElZ-c): _why did u put up with that shit? / why don’t we pack and leave this? / why do you smile when he cries? / why do you cry when he wins?_

Seeing Neil the second time was about as bad as the first time. Worse, actually; Kevin was closer and could, therefore, better see the state of him and who was glued to his side. Andrew, with cooled eyes pinned on Neil’s face, burns, hands, legs, and feet in perfect silence and vigil.

Kevin could trace the way his eyes traced Neil, and he was neither sober nor forgiving enough to pitch face-first into all-consuming despair. His insides were still, his mind quiet. 

All he heard was Andrew’s snarling, Riko’s taunting, and Neil’s mutiny.

“Neil,” he said, in French. His voice held; grating and awful but usable. Neil--Nathaniel turned his blue eyes onto Kevin, and Kevin felt the chill like a distant sting. Black blood, butcher’s red, parental destiny. 

“Riko,” Kevin reminded him. 

“Later,” Neil answered. 

“It can’t wait,” Kevin said, pushing, toeing the line. He saw Andrew shift in his immediate peripheral area. For the first time since Kevin entered the room alongside Allison, Renee, and Dan, Andrew’s attention turned onto him, critical and assessing and void of recognition.

It was a vindictive, vicious sort of triumph, Kevin supposed, that made him turn his face to meet Andrew’s gaze. To rear his head just a little, bare his throat. A steady dark line, marred and patented. Kevin thought he saw Neil’s head snap downward, but he didn’t turn to look. He watched Andrew’s eyes flick along the column of his handiwork--tracing, cataloguing, remembering--before turning a very measured look back on Kevin’s face, ice and blue and--what?

What? Kevin thought at him, in their locked gazes and mutual cruelty. 

All Kevin could think of in the milliseconds before Andrew shoved him bodily away from Neil was the simple truth of Andrew Minyard’s eidetic memory, and this: 

He would never be able to unsee what he had done.

And for the first time in this shithole of a day, Kevin reached up tentative fingers and touched his wounded throat and felt the pain as a faraway sting, like a kind of victory. A fucked-up taste of reparation. 

When he sat back, Renee leaned towards him but stayed her hand. “Water?” She whispered. Kevin gave a slow shake of his head, and took his hand away from his throat. Allison watched him from where she was pressed up against Renee's side, then whispered into her girlfriend’s ear and got up. She came around to Kevin’s left side and slotted herself on the arm of the couch next to him without actually touching him. 

He was sandwiched between them, spaces left carefully in between but only just so, and somehow Kevin did not feel particularly peeved or pressured about it. Even if they were temporary, anything or anyone would do to fill in the new emptiness by his side. The heat from Renee’s thigh and Allison’s bicep scraped at his sides. Somehow their alert forms convinced the brittle thing in him to putter, shudder, and soak up what they were wordlessly offering him.

He did not look up again, allowing the two beside him to watch the room for him, and just listened to Neil speak and Andrew’s silence and the occasional low warning that rose and fell across the rest of the Foxes. 

Then it was time for another concession, this time torn from him by Neil’s mutilated hands.

“We’ll split their attention between Kevin and me,” Neil informed the room. Instantly, Kevin felt the eyes of his teammates on him, alongside Wymack’s.

“I’ll release the name of my father,” Kevin said, staring at a point between his shoes. He felt sick with the pretense. He didn't look at Wymack when he forced his head up, setting his gaze unto Neil and Neil only.

His cowardice was the only reason Kevin saw the slow surprise lurch across Neil's eyes, the meticulous reenactment of almost-pity, mock-horror. And.

Guilt. There was actual goddamned guilt there, pricked and purplish, and it made Kevin see red.

A paper-weight of touch at his shoulder; Allison's low, "Day." 

Kevin blinked, wrangling the hate and anger and betrayal back behind his teeth, and saw what Allison meant. Andrew was staring at him from next to Neil with intent in his eyes, a subtle kind of malice that Kevin knew very well, one that made the rim of his mouth split and curl.

 _Go on,_ he dared. _You did it once, you can do it again._

Kevin felt the eyes of all his teammates on him, looking, seeing, condoning or pitying or denying. He kept his eyes on Andrew and his locked jaw, his brow, the tenseness in his fingers, spread up his arms and coiled in the rest of him like a nocked bow.

"What." Kevin finally said, breaking the silence between them for the first time since Andrew made him talk. His voice was a mangled mess of a thing, launched out of him as if to rip and ruin.

Andrew stared back at him, mouth clenched shut, and didn't speak. Wouldn't. His eyes were iron.

A sharp clap broke the deadlock. "Alright," Wymack said. "This meeting is over. Everybody except for Kevin, get the fuck out."

Nobody moved.

Wymack's eyes went narrow. "Did I stutter, people?"

Dan and Matt skunked past, as did Nicky and Aaron, all of which flicked Kevin and Andrew long, lingering glances. Nicky's unsure; Aaron's dark; Dan's sickly; Matt's reluctant. The door tentatively opened and shut a few times, then fell quiet. Andrew remained sitting even as Neil got up to follow after them. He paused to stare at the lapse in movement, then followed Andrew's attention back across the room. To Kevin. 

Kevin watched them both. He couldn’t afford not to. 

And he would not be the first to look away.

Wymack was standing now, planted like a great oak in the room's middle. His voice was a thick band of steel: "If you aren't Kevin Day with an ego the size of the sun and multiple bruises on your damned neck, _get the fuck out_."

Andrew finally lifted his eyes to Wymack's. His lips pulled back a little to reveal a glimmer of canine. His hand slid to his right wristband. Neil watched the movement and knocked the back of his hand against Andrew's shoulder, as if to stop or reprimand him. 

Wymack remained unimpressed, crossed arms and hard eyes, staring down Andrew from his higher vantage point. He didn't repeat himself.

Andrew finally got up. Neil cast a last glance Kevin's way, eyes carefully blank, before turning shoulders. They left together, and then there was only Abby, Wymack, Allison and Renee left in the space of the room. 

Wymack stared hard at the two women. They stared back, with Allison blowing on her nails and Renee offering up a little unfazed smile. 

"Let them stay," Kevin said, causing his father to turn his attention onto him.

"Are you sure?" Wymack said.

He nodded. Abby took that as her cue and started forward, drawing into Kevin's space, and he held up a hand between them to ward her off.

“I’m fine, really,” Kevin said, knee-jerk. Wymack closed his eyes and pinched the bridge of his nose, the sigh long and shaky around the corners.

"Day, Abby hasn't examined you yet and neither has our residential psychologist. I can literally see the blue from here. Just--sit back and shut up."

Kevin swallowed. Abby kneeled down next to him and set her medkit aside. “Kevin, sweetie.” Her voice was thick but careful, gentle. “Let me help you.”

He took a quick inhale and ripped the band-aid off. He careened his chin off to the side, baring as much of his neck as he could. From Wymack's direction: a sharp, angry intake of breath. Abby's jaw clicked, before a cold finger singed his skin.

"Okay?" She asked, so quiet. Kevin closed his eyes and jerked his head. She continued this way, feather-light grazes that never lingered in one spot for long, trailing along the sides of his throat in swift, precise motions. Soon enough, Abby sat back, grim-faced, and turned a terrible look onto him.

"You need to stop talking," she said. "Your windpipe doesn't seem to be as badly affected, but there is a significant tear on the blood vessels. The bruising is very intensive." She took out an ice pack wrapped in gauze from her med kit and held it out for him to take. "We should've done this sooner, but for the rest of this week, keep an ice pack on you at all times--ten to twenty minutes at a time. Okay?"

Kevin obligingly pressed the ice pack to his throat and grimaced at how quickly and intensely he felt the extent of his bruising. A hand smoothed down the side of his head.

Abby's eyes were two solemn points on his. "If you notice any new or worse breathing, call me. If you start experiencing numbness in either of your arms, call me. If you can't swallow well, call me. Got it?"

Kevin nodded against the ice pack, numb. Abby straightened and looked at Allison and Renee. "One of you will have to be by his side at all times, in case he does have to call me but can't communicate his needs. Can you do that for me?" Her hand, warm and calloused, fell on his shoulder. "For him?"

"Of course," that from Renee.

"No problem," Allison. Kevin could almost see her rolling her eyes. Abby breathed a shuddering sound of relief that vibrated through his shoulder. "Thank you, girls."

Wymack stepped up next to her. "You want me to suspend Andrew?"

 _That_ injected a dose of panic down his spine, straightening out his deflated form immediately. Kevin's gaze snapped to his father’s, and his mouth opened without thinking: "From the team? You can't. No. _No._ Absolutely not."

"Kevin," Abby interrupted, sharp, a finger pressed against her lips. "No. Talking. Not if you expect to tell your winter cup opponents how badly they play."

Kevin clamped his lips together and cast his barely contained alarm back at Allison and Renee.

"Exy freak," Allison told him, but dutifully yanked her phone out and held the neon thing out to him. "Notes app's already open."

He took the cell with quick, urgent hands, a little tremor shuddering through his fingers. They needed all nine Foxes. If Andrew left, there was a real chance Neil might too. They couldn't make that gamble; could hardly afford to. They had to have Andrew's goalkeeping expertise and Neil's unrelenting speed. They needed every scrap and shred even to stand a modicum of a chance against the Ravens.

 _Andrew goes, Neil will too. Can't. No point in that penalty; Exy doesn't matter to Andrew either way. Get it?_ He held up the phone for Wymack to see. His father read it out loud for the room, eyebrows going low and lower, mouth going tight and tighter. 

“He’s not getting off scot-free,” Wymack told him, unrelenting and near-unsympathetic, eyes hot on Kevin’s neck. Kevin would feel touched if the thought of Riko, decked out in black and red, demolishing their team on- and off-court didn’t chill him to the marrow of his bones. But the fact that his father had even entertained the idea of ejecting Andrew from the team both terrified and--relieved him.

For somebody to go that far despite all its awful, insidious consequences. For him, his safety and well-being. 

“It’s fine,” Kevin said again, voice both thoroughly shot and cooled, and Abby threw him another warning look. Wymack’s face went instantly grim.

“Say that again,” he said. “And you’re off the team.”

Kevin wanted to laugh, but stomped out the noise before it peeled free of his throat to call Wymack’s bluff. Ducked his head back down and rapidly tapped at the cell’s buttons. His little circle waited patiently for him to type out: _Very funny. What I meant: now’s not the time for disciplinary action. I have what I need for now: you, abby, allison, renee. That's good enough. Worry about the press attention and pressure from the school board. It’s going to get bad very soon._

Again, Wymack’s brow pinched and made him seem older than he was when he read Kevin’s message, half reproach and half prognosis, aloud. But he stood back, silent, and looked to Abby, and finally gave a frustrated, defeated shake of his head. “Fine,” he conceded, then turned on Allison and Renee. “Don’t let him down.”

“Right back at you,” was all Allison gave for a caustic answer. Wymack scowled at her. Abby gave a snortle before patting his arm. Renee’s mouth curved, and she bumped elbows with her girlfriend. 

“We know, Coach.” She said, sweet. “You can count on us. Kevin,” he looked up at the sound of his name. Her smile grew sharper, edged with icy calm. “Believe us, okay?”

He gave a short nod, admitting his relief, and stranger still: allowed himself to believe her. He made to return Allison’s phone but she swatted a hand at him. “Keep it till we get back. Who knows what other things you’ll break your neck to say. Or won't.” Kevin gave her a dirty look at that, but shoved her cell into his pant’s pocket.

“Call us if you need anything,” Abby reminded them. Wymack grunted an unintelligible sound of gruff agreement. Then he leveled a final look Kevin’s way. “This isn’t over,” he told him, and Kevin had to dread how badly Wymack would take the You're-Actually-My-Blood-Dad news.

The meeting adjourned like that: Wymack’s promise of retribution rattling in Kevin’s head, the remnants of Abby’s fierce grip on his shoulder, and Allison and Renee flanking his sides.

The three of them make it back to the women’s dorm without pause or incident, Kevin holding the ice to his neck, Allison propping the door open to let them inside, and Renee waiting for Kevin to go in first. The common’s area was unlit, the hallway dark; a messily scribbled note sat on the kitchen island when Allison switched on the overhead lights, signed by Dan and snatched up by Renee.

“Out with Matt,” she read. “Takeout in the fridge.”

“Chinese,” Allison called, pleased, and removed the stack of tupperware with a triumphant look about her.

“Perfect,” Renee’s smile was in the arc of her voice. She swung around the island and met Allison in a smooth, short kiss. “I’m going to head over to Nicky’s for a bit.”

At whatever horror that must've dawned on Kevin’s face, she added: “Just to tell him that you’re going to stay with us. That’s it. Okay?” Kevin narrowed his eyes at the mock simplicity of it and eventually nodded. It's not as if he could stop her. Renee gave him a reassuring smile and ducked back out into the hallway. Allison took him by the arm and led him away, handing him a container and a fork on the way to the couch. Kevin flicked on the nearby lights before watching Allision completely take over the piece of furniture.

He flicked her a dull glare, which she let tumble past her with total indifference. "If your ass isn't broke, you can handle the floor." She started to eat with unrestrained gusto. Kevin decided keeping his mouth shut and sitting down with his back facing her was far better than watching all the ways Allison could fit chow mein in her mouth. 

He set aside the slightly melted icepack and pried open his own container, rammed his utensil into whatever it was, and was about to take his first bite when a large crash reverberated through the hallways and into their still opened dorm door. Kevin sat up, takeout forgotten, to listen. A muddled shout sharp through the drywall, a door slam, then silence.

He sat stock-still with Allison propped up behind him, her calves tense next to his shoulders, both of them watching the doorway for any unwanted hauntings.

Nicky appeared, disheveled and exhausted and sickly-looking.

“What’s going on?” Kevin asked him, Abby's warnings tossed to the wayside, already in the motion of getting up. Allison yanked his sleeve back, fingers uncompromising, and he stopped his ascent.

“Just Andrew,” Nicky said, waving him away. He ran a shaky hand through his hair, before cupping half his face and sighing into the spaces between his fingers. “He didn’t take it well when I told him you wouldn’t be in tonight. Or ever.”

Kevin raised an eyebrow, forcing down the shimmer of surprise and a much deeper disbelief. “Really.”

“I may have exacerbated his reaction.” Renee’s voice slid from behind Nicky’s form before she appeared, hair tousled but mostly untouched, cool-looking as always. Her fists were clenched, though, knuckles a blotchy red, and only when she caught Allison’s eyes did the frozen fight finally go out of her frame. 

Nicky shot Renee a look, part pained and part accusatory, before returning his eyes to Kevin. “She told Andrew to his face that you were better off with them, not him.” There was almost awe in his grimace. “She took sides.”

Kevin lost his breath. Allison whistled, low and pleased. Renee watched them without a hint of anguish or alarm. “You picked a fight with Andrew?” When he jerked forward, Allison didn’t tug him back. “Renee, do not tell me you were that stupid. You--you aren’t hotheaded like that. Andrew won't forget, not in a year or a decade. What were you thinking?”

Renee's eyes followed Kevin’s cheekbone down the line of his neck and even lower, down his arm, to the faded white of his scar across his left hand. “Kevin. Do you want an easy answer or the truth?” 

He felt doom come down on him. “Spit it out.”

Her eyes cooled, a silent shade of violence in her compliance. “I was thinking,” and her voice perfectly calm: “That Andrew didn’t deserve an easy let-down. Not with what he got away with.”

"You know, I would 100% agree if I didn't sleep in the same place as him," Nicky muttered. 

Renee didn’t acknowledge him. “If you saw yourself earlier today, you would understand.” 

Kevin’s stomach dropped. “What?” 

“What?” echoed Nicky, uncomprehending. 

Renee’s eyes slid from Kevin’s ashen face to Nicky’s confused one. “Nicky. Do you want an easy answer or the truth?”

The question, repeated for Nicky’s sake, made him straighten up with equal parts anticipation and fear. “Truth,” Nicky gave, unsteady and unsure, but final. Kevin wanted to curl up into himself and suck the marrow out of his bones.

“Renee, don’t.” His voice was a pathetic scrape of a thing. He thought of Andrew, iron-eyed and unsympathetic, and his world, shattered around him. “Please.”

Renee turned to him at that. “Don’t beg, Kevin.” She said. But she looked inexplicably tired, body deadened with the memory of him dry-heaving into Allison’s disgustingly red carpet. “You have my word: I won’t give any fine details. But they should know, don’t you think? Enough to draw their own proper conclusions.”

Kevin swayed on his feet, hovering over the steep plummet of an abyss. Somebody’s hands--Allison’s, with her manicured nails and hardened calluses--took hold of him and sat him back into the cushions of the couch. He sank into them, unable to speak or reply.

Allison did it for him: “Tell him.”

“Kevin had a breakdown in Allison's room.” Renee told Nicky. “It took hours for him to get a grip. He called for Andrew at least three times.”

“What?” Nicky’s voice cracked. “Kevin did?”

Kevin closed his eyes and tried to will breath back into his nose. Allison bent over him, a distantly relieving shadow, and shielded him from Nicky’s probably prying eyes.

“Yes,” Renee’s voice turned over like an unsheathed blade. “Stop trying to get a look at him, Nicky.”

“Sorry.” Nicky backed off, voice small. “God, I can’t believe--God. This is so fucked up.”

“No shit, genius.” Allison sniped, only semi-mockingly. “The monster feel bad about it yet?”

Kevin could hear Nicky’s helpless shrug from here. “I don’t know. He didn't--wouldn’t talk with me. Never does.” The dinner table shook on its legs; Nicky kicked it, probably. “Fuck.”

The silence that followed was tight and uncomfortable. “You should go,” Renee’s voice said.

Nicky swallowed; his shoes shuffled against the floor. “Okay, yeah, just.” He stopped, seemed to wrestle with something, then tried again. “Look after him, yeah?”

“Looking,” Allison said. Not at Kevin. At Nicky, until he gave a surprised little squeak and took a step back.

“Yeesh, is this what you’re going to be like as moms?” It was hardly a jab, but Nicky's voice was already farther away, the metal of the doorknob jangling free. 

“You wouldn’t be invited to the baby shower,” Allison informed him without a touch of sarcasm, and his laugh, high and watery, cut into the tension before the door finally fell closed behind him.

"You okay, babe?" aimed at Renee. Kevin didn't hear her respond, opening his eyes when he felt Allison's shadow slide off him. She was at Renee's side, holding up her knuckles, scrutinizing the redness scraped across there.

"It's all good, sweet," Renee murmured. 

"Babe," Allison sounded both turned on and a beat away from immediate exasperation: "Did you really throw down with Andrew?"

Kevin jerked up completely. " _What._ "

Renee had the audacity to lift her shoulder in a half-shrug. A smile, small and vicious, came over her face. "It wasn't hard."

Allison dragged her into a kiss. Kevin dropped back into the cushions and felt sick.

"I hate you people," he said, miserable. 

Renee came away from Allison's mouth with a breathless laugh. Allison followed her, peppering Renee's jawline with open-mouthed kisses. Seeing the ease between them made something in Kevin ache, terribly.

"If you wouldn't do it, Kevin, then I had to." Allison dropped a final, heated kiss on Renee's lips before retreating to her abandoned post on the couch. Kevin didn't bother moving for her, so her feet ended up jutting uncomfortably into his thighs.

"He won't come near you," Renee said. Kevin looked up at her, vacillating wildly between being peeved, unnerved, and a bone-deep stupor. "I made that very clear."

"You didn't have to," Kevin said, heaving a breath, scrubbing a hand fruitlessly over his eyes. "Shit."

"Stop talking," Allison ordered from her end of the couch. 

"Fuck off," Kevin said, perfectly civil, but dug her cell out of his pocket. 

_Don't do that ever again_ , he tapped out, and showed Renee. Her brows raised in what Kevin would call undeterred amusement if not for the obvious edge of determination in her eyes.

"I'm not going to make a promise to you that I know I will break," Renee told him, as gentle as she could be. Kevin swallowed his retorts.

"I'm not going to be like Andrew," she murmured, and that. That made him loose with petty irony and the kind of desperate ache he could not will away or swallow down without choking on it. Kevin shook his head, grinding the hiccup of disbelieving laughter into dust. Said: _Is that not its own promise?_ When she finished reading, Renee smiled and left him there with a dark screen, slipping back into the kitchen.

A knock, sharp and impatient, came at the door. Renee poked her head out from the fridge, looking between Kevin and the door. "Want me to get it?" Kevin shook his head and stood. He didn’t want them to always be his hands and feet and mouthpiece. He took Allison's phone with him. 

It was Aaron. 

He didn't look at either Allison or Renee, who Kevin could very clearly feel watching from behind him like a pair of guardian gargoyles, but Aaron’s eyes immediately found Kevin's. His gaze swept over him in a perfunctory once-over, and, satisfied with what he saw, evened out his rigid shoulders.

Aaron shoved a plastic bag between them. "Nicky made me do it."

Kevin blinked down at the offending thing, and took out Allison's phone. _I have everything I need_ , he said.

Aaron read the message, then rolled his eyes. "Well, you forgot these.” He jangled the bag, once, in impatience. “Just take it."

Kevin did, peeking inside. He saw freshly packed gauze, muscle relaxation heating pads, face masks, some exy magazines he meant to read accompanied by his favorite highlighters, as well as Jasmine tea packets and instant dark roast espresso, his go-to protein bars. He looked up again, bewildered and kind of touched. 

Aaron was pointedly looking away, on principle or out of embarrassment, Kevin couldn't tell. He just let the smile work unbidden across his lips: “Thank you, Aaron." 

Aaron dragged his eyes back to Kevin's, and whatever he saw there in his face must make him drop his guard for a picosecond, because he very nearly smiles back, the end of his mouth lifting. 

"It's whatever. Text me if you need anything else. Not after twelve, though; you know the rules."

 _I know_ , Kevin typed out for him. Kevin felt warmth like a foreign invasion, simultaneously uncomfortable and too new for complete ease but--nice. It was nice. _Thanks._

Aaron nodded, turned, paused, then turned back.

"I'll keep an eye on Andrew," Aaron said without looking at him, then darted back out without waiting for an answer. Kevin wasn’t sure if he would’ve been able to give one even if Aaron had.

He just stood there, stupefied and weirdly tender, and drew the bag closer to his chest.

"You okay there, himbo?" Allison called.

Kevin just raised a hand in the air, a smile still thawed out over his lips, and meant every bit of it.


End file.
